Send it again and I’m blocking you. I LOVE IT but I’ve already seen it nineteen times.
My staff numbers were small and chaotic, but I adored every single one of them. We were like one big happy family. Danny, my sous chef, was twenty years old and burned things when he was nervous, which was always. Rosa, my line cook, was fifty-three, retired twice, came back both times because her husband talked too much and she needed somewhere quiet.
She communicated primarily through looks and the occasional Spanish phrase that I pretended to understand. Kevin, my dishwasher, was working his way through community college and ate more food than he cleaned. Brittany, front of house, was too pretty for this restaurant and too kind to leave. She’d once charmed a health inspector into a positive review using nothing but eye contact and a complimentary empanada.
That morning's breakfast was rice, a pan of chicken thighs I'd browned in the rendered fat from yesterday's special, and a bowl of charred vegetables Rosa had quietly fixed while I wasn't looking, because she'd decided my knife work on the peppers was an insult to the peppers.
None of it was on the menu and none of it ever would be. It was whatever the walk-in handed me, the produce too bruised to plate and the proteins a day from turning, coaxed into something worth sitting down for.
I set the platters on the prep table and the four of them went from separate people to one organism with eight reaching hands.
"Slow down," I said, mostly to Kevin, who had already built a plate that defied structural engineering. "It's not going anywhere."
"I know." He kept loading it anyway. "I'm just optimizing."
Rosa said something in Spanish under her breath, and though I only caught two words of it, the meaning landed somewhere betweenboyandbottomless.Kevin grinned at her like she'd complimented him.
Danny dropped into the seat beside me and went straight for the chicken.
"This is good, Chef," he said around a mouthful. "What'd you do to it?"
"Yesterday's fat. Waste not."
"It tastes expensive."
"It tastes free."
Brittany slid in last, smelling like the citrus hand cream she went through by the bottle, already mid-thought. "Okay, so the four-top from last night, the anniversary couple? They left a review. Five stars. They called the kitchen, and I'm quoting, 'a hidden gem run by people who clearly love each other.'"
"They could tell that from the short ribs?" Danny asked.
"They could tell that from us." Brittany pointed her fork around the table like she was knighting each of us. "We have a vibe. People feel it."
"The vibe," Kevin said solemnly, "is hunger."
Rosa snorted into her rice, and that was how I knew the morning was a good one, because Rosa only laughed when she forgot to be tired.
I fed them all before every shift. Full plates. Danny mentioned once, casually, almost as a throwaway line, that he’d skipped breakfast because his fridge was empty. The next day, pre-shift portions doubled permanently. When Kevin’s laptop broke during midterms, a replacement appeared on thedishwashing station with a sticky note: “Don’t tell anyone or they’ll all want one.”
Anna scolded me about this regularly. I knew she was worried about me. After all, she had been my good friend since freshman year of college. She usually called to remind me that I was running a restaurant, not an orphanage, and my margins were thinner than Kevin’s excuses for being late.
But today I had some probable good news to share with her.
I told Anna about the production company call over FaceTime during my afternoon break. Anna was propped against silk pillows in her extravagant bedroom, wearing a face mask and eating grapes like a queen being briefed on peasant affairs. One palm rested on her visibly extended belly—she was six months pregnant now.
“Which celebrity?” she asked, popping a grape into her mouth.
“They haven’t confirmed yet. Just said it’s a big name and the segment airs nationally.”
“That sounds amazing. What could go wrong?”
I set down my knife. “That’s exactly what scares me.”
“Here we go.”
“I’m serious. Things have been going too well, Anna. Three months, no disasters. No floods, no equipment failures, no health inspections from hell. That’s suspicious. That’s the universe loading up.”
Anna pulled off her face mask with one hand and paused with a grape halfway to her mouth, eyes narrowing at me over it. The look she reserved for moments when she loved me but also wanted to shake me. “You are not going to manifest a catastrophe because you’re happy. That is not how the universe works.”
